Laman (jamak)

Friday, February 11, 2011

Making /Co/lette part 1

This post is long overdue. It was supposed to be up Tuesday, but better late than never.

These are WIPs pics of a side project I'm working on. She's Colette, a character created by the denizen of 4chan's /Co/ board.
I'll try to document the process of making this figure from sculpting, molding, casting, painting and finishing.
So let's do this!

The material I used is MwaxZ E, my softest modeling wax. I'm not going to make an armature out of wire. I'm going at it straight to wax, with wax 'armature'. I just cut a long strip of wax and divide it into 8 parts. Why 8? for proportion of course. The concept is the same as in figure drawing. I then start to flesh out the major parts of the body, mainly the rib cage and pelvis and continue fleshing out the base form for the figure.

I continue to flesh out the torso and adding the major muscle groups. The way I almost do all my figures are torso > legs > arms > head. Learned that from Burne Hogarth's excellent how to draw books. Here I've finished fleshing out both legs. Look at them thighs!

After finally deciding on a pose, the looking-back pose, I continue to tune the shape and start adding arms. Making sure to make the muscles believable (to a degree), it's best to keep lots of reference.If you haven't done so, check out Matt's Comic tools blog. It really helped me in sculpting the leg and back muscles.

And this is the result of about 2 hours of work. BOOBIES! I'm sorry I skip taking photos while sculpting the head, but it's essentially the same as in the video I post earlier. I've adjusted the pose a bit since it was skewed.

That's it for part 1. In the next part I'll be making some waste moulds and get into detailing the costume and probably other stuff I don't know yet. So be sure to stay tuned next week (hopefully sooner though)!